


A Strange Kind of Love Part 2

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:11:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4222980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's just something about Claire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Strange Kind of Love Part 2

They asked Claire to come to Jurassic Park, rebranded as Jurassic World (cooler! bigger! awesomer!) because she was good at what she did, had degrees in business and science, and had written a dissertation on Henry Wu’s work in the field of DNA. 

She said yes because dinosaurs. Wow.

She also said yes because she needed some distance from her family. From her mother who was constantly reminding her that she needed a family of her own, and from her sister who also wanted to know when she was going to get married, when she was going to get a boyfriend. 

It stressed her out, thinking about this. Being asked about it. 

It’s not my thing, she told them when she was younger. I’m not ready yet, she told them when she was older. 

“But you’re ready for dinosaurs?” Her sister asked. She was crying. Claire never knew what to do when her sister cried. She reached out to pat her shoulder but wondered if that twitch was a sign that she shouldn’t. She pulled her hand back and curled it awkwardly against her thigh as she paced in a tight circle.

“Don’t you remember what happened last time? It was all in the news. Ian What’s-His-Name–he went on the talk shows and said exactly what happened–that a lot of people died!” 

Claire smiled down at her sister. “I won’t let that happen again.”

Later, when they had shown her her office and her live-in quarters, when the park was still being built, she discovered that it was both worse and not quite as bad as she thought it might be.

First, the dinosaurs had not escaped. They had practically been let loose by some saboteur hacker. Second, she knew how to fix that. Electric fencing being the primary method of containment sounded like a good idea on paper, but it wasn’t practical, didn’t account for the numerous things that might go wrong. They needed thick walls that only weather after a hundred thousand years could wear away to rubble. If someone decided to sell them out, take down the safety protocols, let them go ahead and do that. That dinosaur still wasn’t getting out no matter how many times they flung their massive weight against it. 

She asked the structural engineers to draw up a design for something that could hold a trex and they did. During her presentation, Masrani asked her how anybody was going to see a rex through those kinds of walls and how anybody was going to want to come to see an island that was grey as a prison.

“With this,” she said, and she clicked her button so the next slide revealed green foliage and a tunnel made of synthetic bark and glass thick and strong enough to withstand the powerful jaws of a trex. “Another issue with the first park was that it was an elaborate zoo. Nobody wants to travel thousands of miles to see nothing but greenery and branches. But with this–a person can feel like they’re actually interacting with the animal without jeopardizing their safety.” 

Masrani loved the presentation. Knew that they had hired her for a reason. When she wasn’t working, she was reading all the documentation of what had happened in the first park, including Hammond’s unpublished memoir, Dr. Ian Malcolm’s press release where he was laughed off the stage and later book, and Dr. Grant’s publications about the experience which was written in so much jargon that she had a difficult time understanding it.

The only person whose view she didn’t have was Dr. Sattler’s. She searched the web for anything. As far as anyone was concerned, Dr. Sattler’s weekend trip to Hammond’s island was a footnote in someone else’s book. She was teaching at a university, and Claire sent her an email, requesting a chance to speak to her about her experience in the first park. She assured her she wasn’t a reporter. She just needed to know because a new park was going forward, and she wanted it to be as safe as possible.

The first response Dr. Sattler sent back was brief. It said, are you fucking kidding me

Claire shrugged. She’d probably feel the same way if she had been there instead of being here now, when they would have a chance to do this right. The next day, Claire’s phone blipped with another email from Dr. Sattler. This weekend. At the coffee shop on campus. 

Since it was already Thursday, Claire got on the first plane and headed a little further north up towards Arizona. Dr. Sattler was already waiting for her, iced coffee sweating in a cheap plastic venti. Claire ordered something similar and then sat down, only just remembering to smile her most inviting smile and to take off her sunglasses.

They said she looked too intimidating if she didn’t take them off, and she didn’t want to intimidate or come off as cold or rude or any number of things that caused people to get up, walk away, and not come back. 

Even after Claire sat down, glasses neatly folded beside her cup, Dr. Sattler said nothing. Her blonde hair was shot with grey. She wore a coral blouse with the top two buttons loose. She looked like she had strong hands. There were no rings on her fingers, no watch on her wrist. 

“You look just like him,” Dr. Sattler said, finally. 

“Excuse me?”

Dr. Sattler tipped her head up. “When I first saw Hammond, the person who bankrolled our dig and made things possible, he was all in white too.” 

In almost every photograph that Claire had seen of the man he wore the same white suit. “I see.” 

Dr. Sattler took a drink of her coffee. “I can’t believe you’re making another park. After what happened. A lot of people died there.” Dr. Sattler fixed her eyes on Claire, and Claire fidgeted, skin crawling as she felt as if she couldn’t look away. It’d be rude to look away. "I almost died there. People I cared about almost died there."

Her eyes looked wet, like she was trying not to cry.

“Do you know what happened at the first park?” Claire said, lowering her glance as she tore another pink packet of sweet ‘n’ low into her coffee. It would be too sweet, but it gave her an excuse to look away. 

“I think I just told you.”

“A man named Dennis Nedry was paid to steal embryos from Hammond. The lost embryos were never found–presumably they are somewhere still on the island. However, he compromised the park’s security system in order to give him a fifteen minute window to make it to the docks. He never arrived. Unfortunately, this also took the backup generators out of play, so when the storm came, it finished Nedry’s job–” she let the sentence hang. “It wasn’t that the dinosaurs weren’t handled properly. It’s that somebody set them loose, and they’re just animals, after all.”

Dr. Sattler was silent for a long moment. “That doesn’t make me feel better. And it doesn’t make me want to endorse your park.”

“I’m not here for your endorsement, Dr. Sattler,” Claire said. “The park will go forward because Hammond had a lot of money, and the world’s eighth richest man is funding it. But I’m here to make sure it runs properly. I’m here to make sure that people are safe, and if they’re not safe, that we’ll be able to get them off the island. I will be in the control center, and when I’m there, I want to know what happened in the first park so that I’m not repeating the same mistakes.”

“Ian told me that Hammond was making brand new mistakes, but I didn’t want to believe him.” Dr. Sattler leaned back in her chair, her eyes closed against the hot desert sun. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Claire said. “I want to know why the triceratops was sick, and I want to know how you survived and I want to know what you would have done different–besides not doing it at all.” 

They met several times during the course of the next few months. It was mostly business. Sometimes they went to talk and they didn’t and instead shared a silent lunch. Sometimes, they meant to talk to business but ended up not. Once, Dr. Sattler told Claire that she had beautiful red hair, and Claire thanked her for the compliment. Sometimes they went on walks. Sometimes, Claire would look at Ellie–at Dr. Sattler–and she would want something. Something to happen. 

Maybe they could be friends, but the park wouldn’t let them, and Claire didn’t want to give it up and then one time they parted and they didn’t schedule another meeting and they didn’t talk for a long time after that.

About a year after Claire stopped meeting with Dr. Sattler, they started the long process of catching the dinosaurs wandering loose and dangerous on the island. It had taken a lot to take down the t-rex, and Claire watched her from the clear-glass tunnel. Goats for the rex, when she woke, wandered around her still form, chomping green grass, unafraid. They’d never seen a dinosaur before. Had never been chased by one before.

Claire waited for the rex to wake up. Her breath fogged the glass and she had to keep cleaning it with her sleeve. Sweat trickled down her back and made her shirt stick to her. She kicked off her shoes and waited. 

What if they had used too much? The rex was nearing twenty years old, and how long were dinosaurs supposed to live anyway? What if it had a bad heart and couldn’t take all those sedatives? 

She needn’t have worried because the rex woke eventually. Staggering to its feet, shaking the ground with its weight and mass, it woke hungry and angry and the poor goats didn’t stand a chance.

Claire couldn’t watch that, but when it was quiet and the only sounds of breaking things were trees and leaves, Clare uncovered her face with her hands.

Her heart jumped and she reeled backwards from the steady gaze of the rex honing in on her on the other side of the glass.

Too close, much too close. 

“Don’t move,” she whispered, the same words that Dr. Grant had written in his papers. “Don’t move. You can’t see me if I don’t move.”

The rex huffed and the glass clouded over with air and flecks of red. Claire’s pulse skittered and fear strung itself tight through her as her hands curled into fists at her sides. There were scars on the t-rex’s neck–scars given to her by the long, curved crawls of the raptors. 

Dr. Sattler had told her about that. How they thought they were all going to die and then the rex came, chewing down on one of the raptors, and the rest of the pack had shifted their attack.

The rex had saved their lives. 

But it was hard to remember that when Claire could still see its bloody jaws.

The dinosaur left after too many long minutes, and Claire slid against the glass, holding her head in her hands as her whole body shook and as her eyes stung with tears even though nothing had happened–nothing could happen–but the heavy steps of the t-rex were pulse-tremors in her blood.

Occasionally, Claire would drop by the rex’s paddock. What did dinosaurs do all day when they weren’t scaring people, when they weren’t chasing them down, when they weren’t hunters. She discovered that the rex liked to take a nap in the middle of the day, right in a shaft of hot sun. 

The dinosaur slept with its legs bent in a crouch, with its bulk curled in on itself, with its tail stretched out like a thin line through the grass. 

Once, worked too hard, surrounded by too many people with too many names and too few associations to help her remember them all, Claire went back to the paddock. It still wasn’t quite finished, and sometimes they still had to tranquilize the rex so they could make the last finishing touches. It actually looked nice now. The synthetic bark made it look like a hollowed out log. 

But she was tired. There was so much to do. She felt alone in there, focused on seeing the park for what it was–a park–and everybody else in there were wanted her to sit back. To relax. To take it easy.

Well, they hadn’t listened to Dr. Sattler. They hadn’t actually spoken with her. 

Making sure this park was safe, making sure nothing like what had happened before happened again didn’t mean that she could take a relaxed attitude about it. 

How did they not stay up at night thinking about all the possible scenarios that could go wrong and then devising solutions to the problem so that nobody got hurt and nobody died?

Claire closed her eyes. She didn’t mean to fall asleep but she did. When she woke with her mouth dry and a headache drilling between her eyes, she saw the rex watching her. 

But that wasn’t possible because she hadn’t been moving, she had been asleep. Frightened, she rushed out and asked the people who were in charge of feeding the rex if they were absolutely sure that Grant was right that it needed motion to see. They said yeah. They showed her the flares they used sometimes to attract its attention. They even struck one for her, and it blazed red.

“Maybe she just likes your hair,” they said, and Claire left without saying anything, feeling the heavy gaze of the dinosaur even though it was locked behind a fence many feet thick and too high to climb.

After the park opened, Claire didn’t have a lot of spare time to visit dinosaurs when she needed to be working and monitoring and sometimes (hatefully) schmoozing. But sometimes, when she pulled the night shift in the control center, she’d look at the camera feeds. She’d see the rex looking at the tunnel even though it was empty of thronging, excited people anxious to see a tyrannosaurus rex up close and personal (but not too up close and personal) for the first time in their lives.

Claire ran her fingers through her hair, her red hair, and wondered what the dinosaur saw, what she was looking for all alone in the dark, where nothing moved.


End file.
